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Sheila Fitzpatrick

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A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre

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September 2014, no. 364
Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the great betrayal' by Ben Macintyre

Harold Adrian Russell (Kim) Philby was the Third Man of the notorious Cambridge spy network set up in the 1930s and partially unmasked in the early 1950s, when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Moscow. He had been in British intelligence (MI6) since the beginning of the war, but had been working for Soviet intelligence for some years before that. A high-flyer, charming and sociable, he rose rapidly as an officer in the British service and was even tipped to be the next head of MI6. After narrowly surviving the Burgess–Maclean fallout, he ended up in Beirut in the early 1960s, working as a freelance journalist for the Observer and the Economist and an agent for MI6 on the side. Son of a famous and eccentric Arabist, St John Philby, his Middle East coverage struck an old friend, Flora Solomon, as anti-Israel, and in criticising it to her old friend Victor Rothschild she mentioned that back in their youth in the 1930s he had tried to recruit her as a communist spy. Lord Rothschild passed that on to MI5, which had had it in for Philby for years, and in the new round of investigation, Philby’s own bosses in MI6 were convinced. An old friend, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott, confronted him in 1963 and obtained a partial confession, but then inexplicably left Beirut and allowed Philby to flee, courtesy of his Soviet handlers.

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2017 Calibre Essay Prize Judges

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Competitions and programs

sheila fitzpatrickSheila Fitzpatrick, a professor at the University of Sydney specialising in the history of modern Russia, is one of the world’s most influential Soviet historians. She is the author of two memoirs, My Father’s Daughter (2010) and A Spy ...

In My Mother's Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life by Biff Ward

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August 2014, no. 363
Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'In My Mother's Hands: A disturbing memoir of family life' by Biff Ward

For anyone who has ever complained about a difficult mother, or written a memoir about one, this is a humbling book. How trivial, by comparison, our complaints seem. The subtitle promises (or threatens) a disturbing memoir, and so it is. I found it difficult to get out of my head days after reading it.

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History vs Memoir

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June–July 2014, no. 362

In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sandcastle (1957), a young artist called Rain Carter is commissioned to paint a retired schoolmaster, Demoyte, an eccentric with an offbeat sense of humour. Instead of his usual attire – a shabby red velvet jacket with tobacco stains and bow tie – Demoyte turns up ...

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Bluebeard's Bride: Alma Moodie, Violinist by Kay Dreyfus

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February 2014, no. 358
Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Bluebeard's Bride: Alma Moodie, violinist' by Kay Dreyfus

Alma Moodie’s story is remarkable, which makes it all the stranger that she has been so thoroughly forgotten. A frail child prodigy from central Queensland, she became Carl Flesch’s favourite pupil and a renowned concert violinist in Germany after World War I, friend and performer of most of the great figures of international contemporary music, from Max Reger to Igor Stravinsky. As no recordings survive, we have to guess how she played, but it was evidently a style that suited the new music of the time – crisp, rhythmic, and intense, without the overt emotionalism of an Ysaÿe or a Kreisler. She was the dedicatee of violin concerti by Hans Pfitzner and Paul Hindemith, as well as Ernst Krenek, who drew on aspects of her personality as the basis for Anita, the musician who has a brief love affair with the black jazz band leader in Jonny spielt auf, the controversial opera that made his name. Moodie’s story ends sadly with artistic and personal decline before her death in Frankfurt at forty-four, probably by her own hand. But it is the vitality, ebullience, and courage of the earlier years that leaves the strongest impression.

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A Spy in the Archives by Sheila Fitzpatrick

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November 2013, no. 356
Miriam Cosic reviews 'A Spy in the Archives' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

When Sheila Fitzpatrick arrived in Oxford in 1964, with a couple of years of Russian language studies at Melbourne University and a Commonwealth Scholarship under her belt, she had more than a passing knowledge of Cold War spying. Her father, Brian Fitzpatrick, was a labour historian and well-known leftist who had advised the Labor Opposition leader H.V. Evatt ...

Open Page with Sheila Fitzpatrick

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October 2013, no. 355
Open Page with Sheila Fitzpatrick

I like words, though making music is even better. Writing is almost as good as playing the violin.

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In the Moscow archives

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September 2013, no. 354

There’s no ASIO file on me, not even a mention in someone else’s file, according to my keyword search. It’s almost insulting, given that I spent several years in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and later, as a Soviet historian in the United States in the Cold War 1970s, was suspected of being soft on communism. My father, the radical Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick, had an ASIO file, of course. They even trailed him in the 1950s – or at least trailed someone they thought was him, a man of ‘repulsive appearance’ wearing a hat and an overcoat, neither of which he possessed. He would have been tickled both by the surveillance and the blunder. They had a file on my mother, Dorothy Fitzpatrick, too, although they got her middle name wrong. It wasn’t from her days of real left-wing activity in the 1930s, but from the 1950s, years that were among her most miserable and least political, when she was doing a teachers’ training course at Mercer House and then teaching at the Melbourne Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. To ASIO she was an also-ran to suspected communists of more dominant personality like Gwenda Lloyd; probably they included her mainly because of her marriage to Brian. ‘Same views as her husband’, one informant reported, which hardly does justice to a natural contrarian.

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Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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February 2013, no. 348
Sheila Fitzpatrick reviews 'Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life' by Artur Domosławski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

A famous Polish communist foreign correspondent? It sounds like a contradiction in terms, but actually Ryszard Kapuściński did achieve international fame towards the end of the Cold War, after a highly successful career covering the Third World for leading media in the People’s Republic of Poland from the 1950s. Africa and, later, Latin America were his specialties; he was an enthusiast for decolonising liberation movements and an admirer of Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and the French-Algerian theorist Frantz Fanon. 

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My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian childhood by Sheila Fitzpatrick

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October 2010, no. 325
Brenda Niall reviews 'My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian childhood' by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Even the cover design of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s memoir gave me something to ponder. The title, which signals the father–daughter story, is linked with an engaging seaside photograph of the two of them. The father’s swimming trunks and the daughter’s bathing cap have an authentic 1940s look. Add to that a bland subtitle, Memories of an Australian Childhood, and the tough confrontations of the text may come as a surprise.

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